Travels With Charley, by John Steinbeck

A review by Edward Weeks

As his books reveal, John Steinbeck is a writer who is happiest when he gets
down to earth. He is a rugged, broad-shouldered, six-foot Californian, born in
Salinas, and destined to write his first stories about the Valley. He has the
gift of identifying himself passionately with other Americans, with migratory
fruit pickers, as in his novel In Dubious Battle, and with the Okies, as
in The Grapes of Wrath. He relishes doing things with his own two hands;
in a swift self-portrait he writes, "I have always lived violently, drunk
hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two
nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a
time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with
joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment." Gradually
his career drew him into the success and confinement of Manhattan and Long
Island, and it came to him with a shock one day at the age of fifty-eight to
realize that not for twenty years had he seen at close hand the country he had
been writing about.

His new book, Travels with Charley (Viking, $4.95), is a one-man,
one-dog account of the expedition in which he recaptures his familiarity with
America. He set out with some misgiving, not sure his health would stand up to
the 10,000-mile journey he envisioned; as he traveled, the years sloughed off
him, and the eager, sensuous pages in which he writes about what he found and
whom he encountered frame a picture of our human nature in the twentieth
century which will not soon be surpassed.

For the trip Mr. Steinbeck wanted a three-quarter-ton truck, and on it a little
house built like the cabin of a small boat. He tells in delightful detail of
the cabin and of the viands and equipment with which it was stocked. "I had to
go alone and I had to be self-contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his
house on his back." For companionship he took with him Charley, a middle-aged
French poodle, and Charley, as we come to know him, is one of the most
civilized and attractive dogs in literature. They set off together in
Rocinante, as the truck is called, in the early autumn, and they drove north
through Connecticut and on to Deerfield, where the writer stopped to say
good-bye to his teen-age son, one of "two hundred teen-age prisoners of
education just settling down to serve their winter sentence." The boys of
Eaglebrook came down to visit the truck, and "they looked courteous curses at
me because I could go on and they could not." This was the effect that he and
the little cabin were to have on hundreds of casual visitors. "Lord, I wish I
could go with you!" was what they said or thought. And on he goes through the
blazing foliage into Maine, pausing at Deer Isle, commenting on why he prefers
climate to weather and wondering how a State-of-Mainer could ever find
contentment in the sameness of Florida. Then, at our most northerly border, he
turns west, and camping now on a knoll, now beside a trout brook, now in his
man-made loneliness in the drumming rain, he and Charley find their way back to
the understanding of this monster land.

This is a book to be read slowly for its savor, and one which, like Thoreau,
will be quoted and measured by our own experience. It holds such happy passages
as his love for Montana, his rediscovery of San Francisco, and his surprising
new impressions of the Middle West; it holds such horror as he witnessed in the
rancid race demonstrations in New Orleans. And as all good journeys must, this
one suddenly went flat as he was returning through Virginia. Thereafter, his
one desire was to get home, and when a policeman forbade him to drive through
the Holland Tunnel with so much butane in the cabin, all the novelist could say
was, "But I want to get home. How am I going to get home?" Incidentally, in
his passage of over 10,000 miles through thirty-eight states, he was not
recognized even once.